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After 30+ years as my mother's 24/7 caregiver she passed away this past January and since then I have become my dad's primary caregiver so November being National Family Caregivers Month has always been important to me. Not because I want personal recognition for what I do but to help show people that caregiving is more than just medical assistance, it can also be emotional, physical, psychological, that it effects every aspects of a person's life, it can be temporary, short term, long term, chronic,. I would have given anything to make it so my mother had not needed the assistance and now my dad but that isn't possible so I do this so he can have the best quality of life and still live in his own home. So I realized that there are stories out there that have caregivers and whether it's a big or small part of the plot doesn't matter, they help show people what caregivers provide all within very entertaining romances and reading experiences.
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The Larks Still Bravely Singing by Aster Glenn Gray
Summary:
The Great War cost Robert his left leg and his first love.
A shattering breakup leaves Robert convinced that he is a destructive force in romantic relationships. When he finds himself falling in love with David, an old friend from boarding school, he's sure that he shouldn’t confess his feelings. But as their meandering conversations drift from books and poetry to more intimate topics, Robert’s love deepens - and so do his fears of hurting David.
Since he was wounded, David has been batted from hospital to hospital like a shuttlecock, leaving him adrift and anxious. His renewed friendship with Robert gives him a much-needed sense of peace and stability. Slowly, David opens up to Robert about the nervous fears that plague him, and when Robert responds with sympathy and support, David finds himself feeling much more than friendship. But he’s afraid that he’s already a burden on Robert, and that asking for more will only strain their developing bond.
Can these two wounded soldiers heal each other?
Content warning: period-typical homophobia and ableism (probably less than is strictly period typical, but this is a romance novel, not a historical essay), implied/referenced suicide.
Original Review November Book of the Month 2023:
For me there isn't enough WW1/post-war stories in the LGBTQ genre so when I find one, I immediately 1-click it and read it, well circumstances got in the way so even though I purchased The Larks Still Bravely Singing in November 2022 I didn't get a chance to read until now as I was preparing for my Veteran's Day blog post.
I was not disappointed. Aster Glenn Gray is a new author to me which for some can be scary but for me I find it a bit exhilarating, that unknown gets the blood pumping. I was well rewarded and the author is definitely going on my authors-to-watch-for list.
Many of the WW1-era stories in LGBTQ that I have read often have an element of shell shock or what we know today as PTSD, lets face it you can't have a true-to-the era story and not have veterans dealing with the aftereffects of what they faced. Some stories may focus on it deeper, there are a variety of ways shell shock effected the returning men but very few actually have MCs as amputees(at least of the ones I've read), some but not many. So to have both MCs as amputees I found the author handled it wonderfully, from David's refusal to wear a prosthetic to Robert's tiring on long distance walks. I can see where some readers might see David's lack of thinking of Robert's mobility issues as selfish but I don't see it that way. Perhaps it's my love of the era, both in fiction and fact, it can be hard to see past one's own limitations and that doesn't make them selfish, it makes them human. As a caregiver, people have to come to acceptance of themselves and others in their own time. Which is exactly what David and Robert do and that is what makes them tick.
I want to wrap them both up in Mama Bear Hugs and tell them everything is going to be all right but as I said above, we have to accept and find our place in the world on our time. David and Robert deal with these issues in a believable and entertaining way. The author says at the end of the blurb, "period-typical homophobia and ableism (probably less than is strictly period typical, but this is a romance novel, not a historical essay)" and I would say it's a pretty accurate description. There is enough truth to know the author didn't just try and write history by today's standards(which I truly hate) but gave enough fictional leeway to not be bogged down as a school lesson(which I also hate). The Larks Still Bravely Singing is a near perfect blend of fact and fiction to create a very entertaining and heartwarming tale of friendship, romance, and living again.
For me when reading fiction many beliefs can be suspended, its fiction afterall, but there are some elements that need to be addressed at least semi-accurately if not completely spot on, that can't be left at the sidelines. In Larks I was able to tick so many of these boxes:
WW1 ✅
Historical ✅
Post-war ✅
Caregiving ✅
Friendship ✅
Disability ✅
Romance ✅
Larks may not make my annual re-read list but it is definitely not a one and done read either.
Lessons in Discovery by Charlie Cochrane
Summary:
Cambridge Fellows Mysteries #3
Cambridge, 1906.
On the very day Jonty Stewart proposes that he and Orlando Coppersmith move in together, Fate trips them up. Rather, it trips Orlando, sending him down a flight of stairs and leaving him with an injury that erases his memory. Instead of taking the next step in their relationship, they’re back to square one. It’s bad enough that Orlando doesn’t remember being intimate with Jonty—he doesn’t remember Jonty at all.
Back inside the introverted, sexually innocent shell he inhabited before he met Jonty, Orlando is faced with two puzzles. Not only does he need to recover the lost pieces of his past, he’s also been tasked by the Master to solve a four-hundred-year-old murder before the end of term. The college’s reputation is riding on it.
Crushed that his lover doesn’t remember him, Jonty puts aside his grief to help decode old documents for clues to the murder. But a greater mystery remains—one involving the human heart.
To solve it, Orlando must hear the truth about himself—even if it means he may not fall in love with Jonty the second time around…
On the very day Jonty Stewart proposes that he and Orlando Coppersmith move in together, Fate trips them up. Rather, it trips Orlando, sending him down a flight of stairs and leaving him with an injury that erases his memory. Instead of taking the next step in their relationship, they’re back to square one. It’s bad enough that Orlando doesn’t remember being intimate with Jonty—he doesn’t remember Jonty at all.
Back inside the introverted, sexually innocent shell he inhabited before he met Jonty, Orlando is faced with two puzzles. Not only does he need to recover the lost pieces of his past, he’s also been tasked by the Master to solve a four-hundred-year-old murder before the end of term. The college’s reputation is riding on it.
Crushed that his lover doesn’t remember him, Jonty puts aside his grief to help decode old documents for clues to the murder. But a greater mystery remains—one involving the human heart.
To solve it, Orlando must hear the truth about himself—even if it means he may not fall in love with Jonty the second time around…
Original Review from August 2014:
After reading the first chapter in this entry, my heart was breaking for both Jonty and Orlando. For Orlando, because he was missing the past year of his life, for Jonty, because he didn't know if his lover would ever be his again. My heart pounded throughout the story wondering just how that part of the tale would work itself out. As for the mystery put before the pair, I knew they would be able to come to the truth of the historic debate but when solving a centuries old caper would proof ever be able to be definitive? You'll just have to read to find out. Now I'm off to read book 4: Lessons in Power.
Re-Read Review July 2016:
My heart still broke for Jonty and Orlando when Orlando took his fall, even knowing the hows and whys it still tore at me. I love this series even more the second time around.
The Larks Still Bravely Singing by Aster Glenn Gray
Chapter 1
Robert Montagu had not been in bed with pneumonia for so very long. He had fallen ill in February, and it was only April when his sister Enid wheeled him onto the terrace of Montagu House. But the contrast between the raw winter weather when he took ill and the fresh bright sunshine of this gentle spring day made it seem like an eon.
“I feel like one of those chaps climbing out of Plato’s cave,” Robert commented to Enid. “Blinking at the bright light of reality after looking at shadows my whole life. I don’t seem to recognize any of these fellows.”
Secretly he thanked God for it. Perhaps all the chaps he’d slept with had moved along while he was ill.
“We got in a whole new crop of convalescents,” said Enid. For the duration of the war, Montagu House had become a convalescent home, specializing in amputees. After all, they had already installed a lift for Robert in 1915, after he lost his left leg above the knee at the Battle of Loos. It had been a difficult wound, and although Dr. Hartshorn remained optimistic that more surgeries would put it right, so far the stump was no good for a prosthetic.
“Don’t suppose you’d tell me who’s who?” Robert asked. Enid would know all the men’s names. Both Robert and Enid helped out in the wards, but Enid in particular was tireless, uncomplaining, at least on her own behalf; prepared to complain to the death if it might benefit one of the men. Once she and Dr. Hartshorn, the lead physician, had shouted at each other so loudly that it had been audible at a dinner party.
“That fellow walking around the fountain,” she said, with a tip of her head, “that’s Arthur Paige. He’s just got his artificial leg and he’s breaking it in, that’s why he’s walking like that, poor duck. And you see the two men playing catch?”
“They’ve got two arms between them?”
“Otis Sackville and Anthony Tarkington. They’ve both got their right arms, which would be lucky, only Tarkington was left-handed before, unfortunately.” Tarkington was rather good-looking, but in the tall weedy way that had never particularly appealed to Robert, so soon his gaze drifted on.
It caught on the oak tree halfway across the lawn—or rather, on the chap who was walking along one of the oak tree’s low-hanging limbs, arms outstretched as if he were balancing atop a fence, so that Robert could see that he had no left hand. Robert could not see his face, yet he felt a shock of recognition as he looked at the sunlight picking out glints of gold in his light brown hair.
“Are you cold, dear?” Enid asked.
Robert realized he had shivered. “No; no,” he said, but accepted the blanket that she draped around his shoulders anyway. He lifted his chin to gesture at the oak. “Who is that fellow?”
“That’s David Callahan,” Enid said, and Robert felt another chill. “Do you know him?” Enid asked.
“We went to school together.”
“Do you want me to call him over?”
“No,” said Robert, a little more forcefully than he intended. “Not just yet.”
***
David Callahan had not really cared about cricket.
That was, perhaps, an odd reason for Robert to take an interest in him, because Robert had been so mad about cricket that he cried (in absolute secrecy, of course) when he wasn’t made the captain of the eleven. And certainly David wasn’t the only boy who didn’t care about cricket, but most of the others were awful at it, and Robert had always taken their disdain as sour grapes.
David Callahan, on the other hand, showed the makings of a fine cricketer almost as soon as he’d learned the rules. But he never much seemed to care, either about cricket or about the social jockeying that was so much a part of a boy’s life at a boarding school like the Abbey. It had annoyed the other boys, who called it cheek and unforgivable side, although they soon took care not to say as much in front of David, because he had a right hook like a boxer’s.
Not that he cared about that, either. He fought willingly enough when someone else pushed him to it, but he never picked a fight himself.
Robert was in his final year at the Abbey and beginning to get bored of the school himself, and it seemed to him that David was bored of it too, because unlike the rest of them (still mired in kiddish games) he had faced real danger in his life, and true tragedy. He had grown up in South Dakota, land of blizzards, coyotes, tornados; and he had been orphaned when both his parents died in a train derailment.
And of course David was so good-looking, at least in Robert’s opinion. When David arrived, the prairie sun had tanned his face and bleached his hair, so that it gleamed like wheat. During the short days of the English winter his tan faded and his hair darkened to the color of toffee, but his dark wide set eyes retained their bright distant look, as if he were gazing at some far-off horizon that only he could see.
David was sixteen when he arrived at the Abbey, but a childhood diet of American eggs and bacon made him a head taller than the other boys his age, who had been raised on scant boarding school porridge. Sometimes he was clumsy, as if he were not yet accustomed to his size; and some of the boys took this to mean he was slow as a scholar, too, and certainly he didn’t have much background in Greek. “No call for it in the colonies?” asked Babcock, who died in the war three years later, so it wouldn’t do to call him a bully.
“No. We had better things to do,” said David, so indifferently that it took a few moments for Babcock to realize it was an insult. Then he pounced, and that was how the boys found out about David’s right hook.
In the common room, David never flinched and never backed down. But one day not long before the Christmas hols, Robert came upon him curled up in the back corner of the library in the little-used natural history section.
Robert had not expected to find anyone there. In fact, he had come to that corner of the stacks looking for a hiding place to cry over a letter Cyril Sibley had sent from Oxford. Cyril had always been liable to fits of piety, and now—he phrased this very delicately; nothing that could get either of them in trouble—he had decided that their love affair was wicked, and must be broken definitively off.
But David already occupied that corner, sitting with his legs drawn up to his chest, not crying, but flushed and pink about the eyes as if he had been earlier. He lifted a defiant face to Robert, daring him to make something of it.
They sized each other up. “I’m looking for a book about butterflies,” Robert said finally.
David regarded him. He had a sullen, aggressive look, and Robert wondered with wary excitement whether David might hit him. That would distract Robert from Cyril anyway.
But then David’s face relaxed. “You’re interested in natural history?”
Robert nodded. And then: “Are you interested in that sort of thing? Malmsey’s got a natural history club. We trot around the countryside looking for wildflowers and rock formations and so on, and then stop to eat lunch in a pub.”
Lunch in a pub was, secretly, Robert’s favorite part of these expeditions. He had only joined because Cyril was so barmy for natural history. But now he was glad he’d spent all those muddy half-holidays clumping around in the fields, because David’s face split in a big American grin. He lifted the book he was reading, so Robert could see the title: Fossils in Cornwall and Devon. “I’ll be spending Christmas with my aunts,” he said. “They’ve got a cottage in Hawley on the coast of Cornwall.”
“You’ve got aunts?” The rumor in the school was that David was an orphan with no relations but an uncle, who had dumped him here and forgotten him. Certainly no one sent him parcels, a grim fate in a school that expected its students to depend on packages from home to supplement the meager rations.
“Great-aunts. Spinster sisters.”
“Rough luck.”
“No,” said David, a note of surprise in his voice, and Robert realized (and felt a fool for not realizing before; but he had been thinking of his own crabby spinster great-aunt, who sometimes whacked Robert’s shins with her cane) that of course to David any relation who took an interest in him was good luck. “They want me to come. They sent a ticket for the train and everything. I haven’t met them before, but it has to be better than my uncle’s house. He’s still mad at my mother for marrying an Irishman.”
Robert restrained himself, with great difficulty, from asking how that had come to pass. Later perhaps, when they knew each other better. “There are supposed to be wonderful fossils down in Cornwall.”
“Oh yes,” David agreed. “That’s where they found so many of the earliest dinosaur fossils… well, not exactly where I’ll be, but the same general area.” He looked up at Robert, a bright appealing look that made Robert’s breath catch in his throat. “Do you think he’d let me join the expeditions? Malmsey?”
“I can’t see why not.”
“He knows loads about natural history,” David mused. Malmsey taught Latin, for which he did not noticeably care, and the boys often distracted him into talking about mollusks or birds’ eggs. “Why do you call him Malmsey?”
“Well, his surname is Clarence… like the Duke of Clarence, you know, who was drowned in a butt of malmsey… it’s affectionate,” said Robert, because it occurred to him that the murder connection might make it sound rather hostile to an outsider.
Then David laughed. Robert had never heard him laugh before, and the sound appealed to him even more than David’s bright upraised eyes. “What is it with English schoolboys and ridiculous nicknames? Are you afraid someone will hex you if they say your real name?” But David was grinning as he said it, and so Robert was not offended; felt, indeed, that he had made a friend.
The set up of the school did not usually encourage much mingling between boys in different forms, but Malmsey’s natural history excursions threw David and Robert together. They walked as a pair, David clambering up trees and sloshing down into streams and marshlands as Robert trailed after, watching David’s thighs as he slung a leg over a difficult branch, and the way his abdominal muscles flexed when he pulled himself up.
That was pleasurable enough in its way. But Robert liked even better when they stopped for tea at a pub or a farmhouse. At school David was generally reserved; the boys had to badger him to hear anything about his old life. (Robert thought this was a clever piece of work on David’s part: the boys wouldn’t have rated his stories of snakes and tornados half so highly if David told them willingly.) But after a long day tramping the countryside, mud-spattered and red nosed with cold, as they sat drinking tea from tin cups in a farmyard David would talk.
“We used to have a brown Jersey just like that,” he might reminisce, nodding to the cow chewing its cud placidly in the field, and then he would be off. “The homestead never paid, though. Dad had to get a job at Mr. Mahoney’s dairy, maintaining the machinery.” He said this quite as naturally as if it were a normal thing to have one’s father go to work in a dairy. One of the farm dogs came over to sniff at their feet. It pressed its nose into David’s cupped hand, licking for crumbs, and David fondled its ears. “After my parents died, Mr. Mahoney offered me a job. I could have worked my way through high school, but then Uncle Bernard,” (he pronounced it that American way: Bernard, the accent on the second syllable) “sent a telegraph, and everyone was so impressed by the idea of an English boarding school…”
David’s hand had stilled on the dog’s ears, and the dog gazed mournfully up at him. Robert swung his foot sideways to kick David’s. “Well,” Robert said. “I’m glad you’re here.” David smiled over at him, a quick smile that went to Robert’s heart, and Robert added, “My grandfather—my mother’s father, I mean—started out as a farmer in Pennsylvania. My mother always says they were poor as church mice till Grandpa found mineral deposits on the land and started a paint factory.”
“Why did she ever come to England?”
It was a cheeky question, especially spoken in that tone. But David rarely seemed to realize he was being cheeky (off school grounds he even called Robert by his Christian name, although at least he had the sense not to try that in the Abbey), and, off school grounds, Robert often let him get away with it. “I suppose she had some idea of marrying into the English aristocracy,” Robert said, “although she didn’t quite make it.”
In summer term Robert offered to help David with his Greek. (He had some idea of reading the Phaedrus with him, but David’s Greek proved so abysmal as to make this impossible.) All the seniors got their own studies at the Abbey, tiny rooms that had one been monk’s cells, and so David began to come often to Robert’s study.
Robert could not say exactly when David had begun to return his interest. Certainly he’d seemed frightfully pi at first, worse than pi in fact, absolutely oblivious to everything of that sort.
But he was not oblivious any longer by summer term. Robert remembered a particular day, a warm golden day in June, David sitting on the hassock at Robert’s feet. Late afternoon, motes of dust floating in the sunlight that poured through the windows. Halcyon days.
David had lifted his face toward Robert, and Robert knew in that moment that he could take David’s face in both hands and kiss him and David would let him, would love it, would be his.
And he had not because—well, it seemed unfair, in a way. There was an expected order of things, quite different from the sermons in church but even more ironclad in its own way. The new boys were supposed to hero-worship the seniors in their nearly grown-up majesty. Then, as they grew into seniors themselves, their affections were meant to turn back toward the new boys, as the closest thing available to girls; and once they’d left school, after Oxford or Cambridge or Sandhurst, they were supposed to fall in love with women.
Robert had succeeded splendidly in the first phase of this plan, and then never got past it; when he should have been charmed by the girlish beauty of the new boys, he kept falling in love with his fellow seniors. Of course, David was younger than Robert, but he was almost as tall, and although Robert loved the way he looked, he was not the kind of good-looking that could be described as pretty.
Robert did not quite know, then; he was still young enough to push inconvenient knowledge away from him. But he already suspected that he did not have it in him to fall in love with a girl.
David, though. He told stories about his American high school, about the classes with boys and girls sitting side by side, dances in the gymnasium… “Did you dance with a girl, Yankee?” Thatcher had cried, his face avid; and although most of the boys would have scorned to be so obvious, affected in fact a haughty dislike of girls, they crowded round to hear as David said yes, he had, lots of girls, and it was splendid, his face growing ever so slightly pink with the memory.
David had not deigned to share her name with the crowd, but on one of their tramps through the countryside, he had mentioned to Robert the girl he had liked best, Caro. The corners of his eyes crinkled as he reminisced, “We used to tease her because she curled her hair.”
“She sounds vain,” Robert pronounced, goaded by a stab of jealousy that he did not recognize as such until long after. David had frowned and told him nothing else—in fact, stopped talking to him entirely for the next hour. Robert had told himself he was glad, and didn’t care, and really had been sorry.
David liked girls. It would just complicate things for him if Robert corrupted him. And so Robert, aglow with the flame of conscious chivalry, had risen from his chair to lean out the window, and point into the empty sky, and say, “I say, old chap, is that a curlew?”
It seemed an awful lot of rot now, looking back. They should have seized the day. But who knew then that time was so short? It was June of 1914. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand had not yet been assassinated, and they had no reason to believe that the high Edwardian summer would not continue forever.
Lessons in Discovery by Charlie Cochrane
St. Bride’s College, Cambridge, November 1906
Champagne. A dressed Cromer crab. Strawberries.
How Jonty Stewart could have got hold of strawberries on the fifteenth of November only the angels could say, but there they were on the table along with a jug of cream and a bowl of sugar to indisputably prove their existence. Orlando Coppersmith reached across to take one of the little ruby-like fruits but a sharp slap to his hand stopped him.
“No pudding until firsts are done with, you know that.” Jonty grinned like a schoolboy and heaped crab upon their plates.
“Why all this opulence? I’ve not seen such a lunch in ages.” The bright noontime sun slanted in through the latticed windows of Jonty’s study, the mellow gold stone of St. Bride’s college shining with a warm lustre.
“Do you really not know, or are you teasing me again, in revenge for all the times I’ve teased you?” The blank look on Orlando’s face seemed to show that he really had no recognition of the significance of the date. “It’s exactly a year to the day that I came back to St. Bride’s and so underhandedly stole your chair in the Senior Common Room. Don’t you remember?”
Orlando smiled. “The day is forever etched into my memory. That afternoon was the last time I enjoyed any peace and quiet, for one thing.” A crab claw came flying through the air but he swerved neatly to avoid it. “This champagne is truly extraordinary.”
“Mother sent it, she always has champagne on her wedding anniversaries.” Jonty admired the sunlight-kissed bubbles then took a deep draught. “Do you know, the man who invented this compared it to tasting stars. He was absolutely right.”
Orlando looked at his glass with a degree of suspicion. “Just why did your mother send us champagne?”
“For our anniversary, of course. Do I need to spell it out to you like I spell out As You Like It to my dunderheads of students? She wanted us to have something special today, as she and Papa do.”
The answer didn’t mollify Orlando. He knew that Helena Stewart was aware of exactly what went on between him and her son, but this gift seemed a touch too blatant. He drank it nonetheless, enjoying the food, which he guessed Jonty’s mama had also had a hand in providing.
“Seems appropriate, really—” Jonty had finished his seafood and was ready for more chatter, “—as I often feel like we are a married couple in all but name. Oh, I say, let me slap your back.”
The food and drink had conspired to attempt an attack on Orlando’s lungs and he began to choke. A whack from Jonty’s strong hand dislodged the offending items, enabling him to take several breaths, and another glass of bubbly, to recover. “You feel like we’re married?”
“Of course I do, don’t you?”
“I’ve never thought of it. Still, I guess that marriage of any kind has never really entered my head.” Orlando frowned, having to mull over that common thing, a revolutionary thought from Jonty.
“Consider this. We spend as much time as we can together, we often share a bed, we take holidays with each other, we are absolutely faithful—well I am, I have my suspicions about you and that chap from the college next door—so many things that any respectable married couple would do. It’s only the matter of getting children that makes us different and neither of us have the anatomical requirement to oblige on that score.”
“And we can’t take the vows, Jonty, the marriage vows. No respectability for us.” Orlando knew it galled his lover, not being able to walk hand in hand together along the river, never to be able to dance together or show any untoward display of affection. Perhaps one day the world would be a more understanding place, but not now.
“Bit of a shame, if you think about it, because we live by them. ‘For better or worse, cleaving only to one another’ and all that. Think we might do a rather better job of it than some of my father’s friends.” Jonty sighed, refilled their glasses and ushered his guest from the table to the deep armchairs before the fireplace. “Such a shame that I can’t show everyone how much you mean to me.”
Orlando’s chest swelled with pride. He knew exactly how much they loved each other, and couldn’t help but bask in the glow every time Jonty said something like this. He reached for Jonty’s hand. “You mean the world to me, too.”
Jonty looked at him as if he was making absolutely sure of what he was about to say, which wasn’t a usual Stewart trait. “The university is modernising. These are new times. We don’t need to live in college anymore, you know. We could take a nice property up on the Madingley Road and set up house together. As long as we had a housekeeper who wouldn’t be too fussy about how many beds had been slept in. Miss Peters could probably find us a suitable one.”
“A house?” Dining out of college had been shock enough, going on holiday a jolt to the system, but to live outside of St. Bride’s, that was unheard of. “And why Miss Peters? You don’t think that she suspects about us?” Ariadne Peters was the sister of the Master of St. Bride’s, and the only woman apart from the nurse permitted to live in the college’s hallowed grounds.
“I think it quite likely that she does, she being possibly the most perceptive person in St. Bride’s. In any case, she’d be far too discreet to say anything as this college has seen enough scandal. Nonetheless think on the idea of a house. I don’t propose it idly.”
“I will think on it, but you must let me recover from my surprise at the suggestion before I can make a rational decision.”
Jonty nodded and they refilled their bowls with the last of the fruit. When there wasn’t even the merest hint of the existence of a strawberry left, Orlando wiped his hands with great precision then reached into his pocket. He drew out a small red box, which he handed to his friend. “Thought you might like this, as a memento of the last year.”
“So you did remember, you cunning old fox.” Jonty opened the lid and immediately shut it. “I can’t accept this, it must have cost you a small fortune. Take it back, get the money and put it in your savings.” He flushed red and couldn’t even look his lover in the eye.
“I will not take it back and you will accept it. You were the one who spoke of marriage, so perhaps this is an appropriate gift.” Orlando opened the box himself, taking out an exquisite signet ring—Welsh gold, of an amazing hue—that had been made specially to his order, great subterfuge and a piece of string having been used to gauge the size of Jonty’s little finger as he slept. “Please put it on for me.” He admired the golden circlet as it twinkled in the late-autumn light. Jonty could walk around Cambridge wearing his ring and it would always be symbolic of their union.
Jonty slid the band over his finger, pronounced amazement at the accuracy of fit, and grinned. “I’m ashamed to say I have no equivalent gift for you.”
“No need, strawberries in November are priceless. And you’ve given me the best year of my life.”
“Truly? Even including murder most foul, an unwanted suitor and our lives endangered?”
“Absolutely. Never been so happy.”
“And is that you talking or the champagne?” Jonty put his head to one side, like a bird.
“Oh, definitely me. The drink would make me say much naughtier things.”
Jonty smiled, indulgence lighting his face. “Let’s take a walk up to the lock and enjoy this unseasonably mild weather.” Through the latticed window the piercing blue of the sky, found only in England in spring and autumn, mirrored Jonty’s eyes. “Then we can come back here and read the sonnets together. Even number eighteen.”
Jonty liked the early sonnets, although Orlando had been terribly shocked to find out that the intended recipient had been a man. When he’d discovered number twenty-nine it had brought tears to his eyes, speaking to him so clearly of his own situation—the death of his father, the years of brooding and then the arrival of Jonty.
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate…
Orlando always read it every time he felt low, which was less and less often, now.
*****
It was such a fine afternoon, they ventured far beyond the lock to a stretch of river where a few rowing eights were practicing, their red-faced coaches cycling along the towpath, scattering ducks and little old ladies as they went.
“Did you ever attempt rowing, Dr. Coppersmith?” They’d been content to use Christian names when they were in public on holiday, but back in their own city they’d gone back to their usual formality.
“I did, with no great success. Every time I took to a boat I seemed to have acquired an extra pair of knees and all four of the bony things kept trying to smack me in the ear.”
Orlando laughed and Jonty laughed with him. Orlando’s attitudes had changed beyond all recognition this past year. Before Jonty had come and stolen his chair, he’d been sullen, unsmiling, someone who viewed intercourse as akin to the preparation of Egyptian mummies—he knew the procedures existed, but the mechanisms were a puzzle and the process itself of no interest. Neither love nor easy laughter would have been possible before Jonty came along. Anything was possible now, even intimacy. Now they made love for all sorts of reasons, not just for gratification but in friendship, for consolation, because they were happy or because they were sad.
Jonty smiled indulgently as they walked along, even while he was sniggering just a little at the sight of a seven-foot oarsman suffering a tongue-lashing from a cox who was all of four foot eleven. He could see this idyllic life stretching long into the future, God willing, with his true love by his side and a bank balance full of his grandmother’s money to support them in whatever they decided to do. To buy a little house, with an apple tree in the garden and a flowering cherry outside the bedroom window, that would be ideal. Some of the furniture held in store for him up in London or down in Sussex could grace it, although it might seem rather grand for a little villa up the Madingley Road. If Orlando would ever agree to their buying one.
The two men tired of watching the rowing, turned and began to amble back to the college, a slight anticipation starting to bubble up in Jonty’s stomach. There was every chance that he could get Orlando into a bed this afternoon, and that would be an absolute delight. Even if the mattress wasn’t visited there would still be at least a hug or two on the sofa which was always very pleasant. They’d reached a stage where the last favours were not the be-all and end-all, wonderful as they were. Jonty cast a glance across at his lover and caught him, unquestionably, in the same act of anticipation.
Orlando blushed, something that hadn’t happened for a long time. I know what you’re contemplating, Jonty mused. Great minds definitely do think alike.
Their pace quickened and by the time they reached the Bishop’s Cope they were no longer just ambling but striding along with great purpose. Their tempo was brisk by the time they passed the porters’ lodge and they positively sped up Jonty’s staircase, eager to find themselves alone and safe to express their affection.
Orlando was taking the steps two at a time, as usual, in his desire to be in the room as soon as possible. He misjudged the edge of a particularly worn stair, which had endured hundreds of years’ worth of treading and wasn’t inclined to be kind anymore, then slipped. Perhaps nine times out of ten a man might have done that and suffered no worse than bruised knees or a scraped hand. Orlando suffered the ignominies of the tenth, and went clattering halfway down the flight.
It was ironic. Orlando normally led the way, making the joke that Jonty should be behind him in case he slipped, so that there would be adequate padding to break his fall. But this day Jonty was ahead, even more eager to reach the room than his friend was. He heard the tumble, turned—dismayed—and rushed back.
“Orlando!” Their rule about names was immediately broken. This was a moment of crisis, as the minute Jonty looked down he could see that his friend wasn’t moving. “Can you hear me? Are you all right?” He reached the crumpled body, was relieved to see the chest rising and falling and to hear that the breathing sounded clear.
But there was no response, not even a moan, and blood had begun to trickle from the back of Orlando’s head.
Jonty leapt up, his heart racing and a nauseous feeling filling his stomach. He knocked at the nearest door, demanding that the occupant go to the lodge to make the porters fetch a doctor. The inhabitant of the next room was sent for Nurse Hatfield. He returned to keep an eye on Orlando, making sure that he was comfortable and not about to do anything dramatic like swallow his tongue. It was all he could do, apart from worry himself sick.
*****
Nurse Cecily Hatfield steamed up the stairs like a great ocean liner, cleaving a path through the knot of ghoulish students who’d formed to observe the scene and who’d ignored Jonty’s instructions to “bugger off”. They didn’t dare ignore the nurse’s rather more politely worded invitation to do the same.
“Don’t know why they do it,” she complained, kneeling down and efficiently checking Orlando over for breaks or bleeding. “Nothing interesting in another person’s distress, is there? Well, there are no bones broken as I far as I can see and I think—” she gingerly felt around Orlando’s head, “—the skull’s intact too. Bit of bleeding, but his breathing’s nice and steady. Not been sick, has he?”
Jonty shook his head, afraid to speak in case his voice betrayed him. He was petrified that the words No, he’s just lain there would actually come out as Please don’t let him die, I love him so much.
The doctor arrived promptly, the same man whom Jonty had first met over the dead body of a murdered man, years ago it seemed now. He made his own examination, confirming Nurse Hatfield’s initial diagnosis and advising that the man could be moved on a stretcher to the sick bay.
Jonty sped off to the porters’ lodge to organise the people and equipment to do this, glad to have something to do that was helpful and practical. Something which took his mind off the poor bloodied head lying on his staircase.
Time became distorted and things passed in a daze. It seemed to take forever to get Orlando onto the stretcher, then only a matter of seconds before he was being put onto a bed in the sick bay and the nurse was thrusting a piece of paper into Jonty’s hand. It was a list of things the patient might need, carefully written down,
“Because I’m not sure you’ll remember otherwise, Dr. Stewart. Not in your present state.” She’d no doubt recognised his need to be busy, filling him up with heavily sugared tea to give him the resources to do it. “I don’t want another young man falling down those stairs, this time because of fainting or delayed shock.”
While Jonty was away fetching Orlando’s nightclothes and wash bag, Orlando recovered consciousness and the extent of his injuries became clear. Or so Dr. Peters informed him as they met outside the door to the sickroom, his firm grip stopping Jonty barging straight in to greet his now-awakened friend.
“Dr. Coppersmith’s just with the doctor at present.” Peters saw Stewart’s worried look and smiled kindly. “He is in no danger, our medical friend seems quite confident about that. But there is something you should know before I let you in there. He’s lost some of his memory.”
“I don’t understand. Is this usual with a head injury?” Jonty was full of renewed concern. He’d heard Orlando go flying and seen the way his skull had struck the step; it worried him enormously.
“The doctor assures me that it is not abnormal. He may regain all that he has forgotten, eventually. He can remember the students coming back for the start of Michaelmas term…”
“Poor Orlando. He’s been hard at work on a treatise these last few weeks and now I suppose he’ll have to rethink it.” Jonty smiled tentatively.
“No, Dr. Stewart, I have expressed myself poorly. It is the Michaelmas term of last year he remembers, nothing since. I think it’s even possible that he will not recognise you.”
Aster Glenn Gray writes historical romances and fairy tale retellings. (And maybe other things too. She is still a work in progress.) When she is not writing, she spends much of her time haunting libraries and contemplating whether it is time for another hot chocolate.
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Charlie Cochrane
As Charlie Cochrane couldn't be trusted to do any of her jobs of choice - like managing a rugby team - she writes. Her favourite genre is gay fiction, predominantly historical romances/mysteries, but she's making an increasing number of forays into the modern day. She's even been known to write about gay werewolves - albeit highly respectable ones.
Her Cambridge Fellows series of Edwardian romantic mysteries were instrumental in seeing her named Speak Its Name Author of the Year 2009. She’s a member of both the Romantic Novelists’ Association and International Thriller Writers Inc.
Happily married, with a house full of daughters, Charlie tries to juggle writing with the rest of a busy life. She loves reading, theatre, good food and watching sport. Her ideal day would be a morning walking along a beach, an afternoon spent watching rugby and a church service in the evening.
Aster Glenn Gray
Charlie Cochrane
The Larks Still Bravely Singing by Aster Glenn Gray
Lessons in Discovery by Charlie Cochrane
